MODERNITY AGAIN: THE MUSEUM AS

TROMPE L’OEIL
DONALD PREZIOSI

Philosophy wants to arraign it and can’t manage. But what has

produced and manipulated the frame puts everything to work
in order to efface the frame effect, most often by naturalizing it
to infinity, in the hands o f God (one can verify this in Kant).
Deconstruction must neither reframe nor dream o f the pure and
simple absence o f the frame. These two apparently contradictory
gestures are . . . systematically indissociable.
—Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 73

b o v e all, museums are social instruments for the fabrication and

A maintenance o f modernity. Historically coterminous with our

modernity, they have served as one o f its central and definitive
institutions and instances. Museums frame history, memory, and meaning
through the patterned deployment o f artifacts abstracted from our own
and other societies, choreographing these together with the bodies o f
beholders.
In so doing, they labor to stage, define, and discipline desire, erect
templates for the composition o f our interpersonal selves, finalizing the
past as ordered, oriented, and arrowed. Museums have always, every­
where, been teleological machines and landscapes o f geomancy.
In the museum, the past is staged as prologue to our presentness,
predisposing that presence to a telling and narrative order: in a line o f
fiction. In producing the past through retroaction, and the future
through anticipation, w e are storied, movied, and made to reckon with
ourselves as subjects in the performance o f modern life — as agents o f
modernity and as celebrants in the service o f that sanctimonious aesthet­
icism that in our own time masquerades as History. One o f the spaces
o f memory par excellence in the West since the eighteenth century, the
museum is one o f our premier theoretical machineries, and in many ways
the very emblem o f desires set into play by the Enlightenment, providing
us with yet another powerfully canny displacement o f religiosity.
Typically, we have sought to understand the mechanisms o f de­
sire set into play by the modem museum by foregrounding what museo­
logical scenographies mask or marginalize — normally in the name o f
historical fullness or “ truth,” in the name o f restoration and o f re­
presentation. That this activity inevitably fails highlights a perennial in­
ability to understand just what exactly it is that museums do, and what
D O N A L D P R E Z IO S I they so powerfully achieve in their massively coy ways. The intractability
o f the institution to critical inquiry or sociohistorical analysis runs like a
dissonant chord through the huge body o f writing about the museum
over the past two centuries.1 Regardless o f attitudes toward its preservation
or reform, the modem discourse on the subject remains complicit
with the museum’s most fundamental programmatic mission — the fabrication
and maintenance o f modernity.2 This essay is addressed to these
problems both in general and in terms o f a specific institution and its
relationship to what has come to be the canonical dramaturgy o f the
modem civic museum.3

⋆ ⋆ ⋆
The early growth and development o f the civic museum o f art in Europe
were complexly linked to a variety o f what in hindsight can be read as
disparate solutions to a number o f historical problems attendant upon
and precipitating massive social changes in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Th e museum — the m u seo lo gica l - can be understood
as correlative to the following developments:
1. the enorm ous dissem ination o f the novel as the rom ance o f bourgeois subjectivity
and social defin ition : in particular, the crafting o f novels as spatio-
tem poral riddles w h ose resolutions invariably require the literal o r figurative
repositioning o f protagonist o r narrator to a panoptic locus from w h ich , in
hindsight, h o w and w h at to o k place b ecom e legible or visible;
2. the gro w th and standardization o f jo u rn alism in E u ro p e and A m erica, and
in particular the develo pm en t o f newspapers fo r general readerships, w ith
their increasingly fram ed or “ articled” organization and layout, w herein
every “ story” is staged as a fragm ent o f som e o n go in g, narratizable totality,
som e “ histo ry” o f current events “ to be con tin u ed” ;
3. the increasingly fixed functional zo n in g o f the bourgeois house, w herein
interpersonal episodes com e to be stabilized and localized in space—tim e as
parts o f an ideal, recurrent, “ natural” fam ilial story;
4. the massive reorganizations o f education in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries and the con cu rren t articulation o f academ ic “ disci-
plines” — in short, the po licin g, m ilitarization, and hygienicization o f knowledge
and inquiry, m ost especially in the natural sciences;
5. the fragm entation and com m od ificatio n o f labor, and the rhetorical and spatial
lo g ic o f n e w industrial processes and technologies;
6. the transform ation o f a variety o f institutions, but m ost notably hospitals,
prisons, and schools, into analytic theaters fo r distinguishing health and social

1A substantial bibliography dealing primarily with earlier institutions may be found in Oliver
Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities
in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 281—312.
See also Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge University Press, 1984); Hubert
Damisch, “ The Museum Device: Notes on Institutional Changes,” Lotus International, no.
35(1 982):45—8; Louis Marin, “ Fragments d’histoires des musées,” Cahiers du Musée nationale
d’art moderne, no. 1 7 / 1 8(1 9 80): 17- 36; Helmut Seling, “ The Genesis o f the Museum,” Architectural
Review 1 4 1 (1967):1 03—16.
2See especially C. Duncan and A. Wallach, “ The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History
3, no. 4(1980):448-69; idem, “ The Museum o f Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An
Iconographical Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives (Winter 1978):28—5 1; Rosalind Krauss, “ The
Cultural Logic o f the Late Capitalist Museum," October 54(1990): 3 -17.
3This essay is a condensed synopsis o f chapters o f a volume in preparation entitled Framing
Modernity, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

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 norm alcy from disease, crim inality, and maladaptation to increasingly codified M O D E R N IT Y A G A IN
and stabilized norms;
7. the increasing theatralization o f the (increasingly firm ly bounded) nation-
state as an arena for the display and perform ance o f capitalization, techn o-
logical com petition, and entrepreneurial violen ce;
8. the massive m ou ntin g o f n ew fairs, national and civic expositions, panoramas,
and other public celebrations, for the collective perform ance o f national or
ethnic heritages, and for the crafting and perform ance o f a “ fo lk .”

The resonances o f all these with the aestheticist and historicist agendas
of the new civic museums o f art should be quite palpable. As correlative
to the aforementioned, the museum nonetheless came to serve as a central
e v id e n tia ry institution supportive o f the identities and trajectories of
the modern nation-state.
Museums stage synecdochical landscapes, gathering in a common articulated
space fragments o f totalities past, distant, or absent. Their task
has been the judicious assemblage of objects and images deemed especially
poignantly evocative o f time, place, personality, or mentality — o f
the artisanry or genius o f certain societies, groups, genders, classes, races,
or individuals.
In this respect, the museum is a house o f part-objects, a tableau or
spreadsheet o f evidence for something, an archive o f v e d u te or windows
upon time, place, historical moment, ethnicity, or biography. There is
a certain unavoidable resonance here with geomantic rituals wherein the
proper siting/sighting o f objects or formations works to guarantee the
preservation o f the spirit o f the departed or absent person or group. In
the museum, what is guaranteed above all is the spirit o f artisanry, o f
the aesthetic as a kind o f thing, o f the existence o f such a th in g as Art
beneath what are staged as its myriad manifestations or exemplars. What
is more deeply at stake, after all, in the labor o f this theophanic m achinery
, this projective holography, is the maintenance o f what we
are prepared to see as quintessentially human, b en ea th what we are also
prepared to see as quintessentially Flemish, Florentine, Polynesian, or
Islamic.
Within this geomantic landscape invoked by the museum, the characteristic
task o f art history and criticism has been the promotion o f a
moral semiology, a system o f protocols or “ methods” to render these
ruins legible, to cause them to speak, to induce them to declare themselves
and tell their tales. The discourse o f the discipline o f art history is itself
a simulacrum o f the topologies o f museological space, o f its ideal geom etries
, made up as it is o f metonymies perpetually at work on the
production o f a basic, overriding metaphor — that art is to Man as the
world is to God (or, more accurately, that art is to men as the world is
to God).
Museums serve as catalysts for certain kinds o f stories, certain tropic
materials that render all but inevitable the predication o f a very particular
type of “ history” to explain and valorize the presentness we would like
to believe in - that m o d ern ity by which we distinguish ourselves from
the ancients and from others. Museological space constitutes a remarkably
powerful theater for the practice o f historiographic dramaturgy,
making o f the present an anamorphic point for imagining the past.

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D O N A L D P R E Z IO S I A second effect o f this museological labor is no less important: Museums
work on a complementary front to fashion and perpetuate certain
ideals o f selfhood and subjectivity. Objects are deployed within what
may be termed predicative frameworks with respect to a beholder’s subjecthood
. In their materiality, in their focused and palpable quiddity,
museological objects project and predicate a certain individuating gaze,
setting into play an inevitable scopophilia: Seduced as we always are
into searching for and articulating the unities, the principles o f reason
in objects and images, we invariably s(t )imulate our own. Here the
modern museum shares with its ecclesiastical antecedents the programmatic
deployment o f emulatory and exemplary imagery, o f im a gin es
a g en tes. The seductive palpability o f the museum object evokes a desire
to mimic and possess its com posure, its spirit(uality) - which is perforce
to say its sexuality - a sexuality that, o f course, is invariably gendered
as female.
W e are dealing, then, with an institution o f astonishingly powerful
and subtle illusion. Y e t the museum is no simple utopic inversion o f the
world o f daily life, not quite an escape from the world. In articulating a
space o f all times that itself seems outside o f time or inaccessible to its
ravages — the illusion o f the aesthetic as a homogeneous realm o f the
cognitive, as an “ inside” uncontaminated by or mixed with what is
thereby enframed as an “ outside” — the museum works rather more
heterotopically, as one o f a series o f places within social life that anam
orphicaly
provide compensatory relief from the confusions and contradictions
o f social life - themselves all the more palpable by contrast.
In short, museums are not exterior to the world o f daily life; they are
rather one o f the factories for its production.
It will be clear that there are several intermeshed circuits o f illusion
here. As it has evolved since the eighteenth century, the modem civic
museum has worked to sustain the circulation o f the following effects:

1. the idea o f A rt as a kind o f th in g and o f the aesthetic as a distinct realm o f

the cogn itive;
2. the idea o f A rt as m edium , sign, o r com m u nicative token;
3. the furtherance o f the notion o f the Su b ject as com posed o f m atter and spirit
w h erein the fo rm er is expressive, o vertly o r covertly, o f the latter;
4. the pro m o tion o f the idea o f the nation-state (“ Fren ch pain ting” ) as a natural
entity that is racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct; in particular
the notion o f the nation-state as a Su bject w rit large;
5. correlatively, the idea o f the historical period as ho m o gen eo u s and unified;
6. the aestheticization o f history as narrative teleology; and
7. the historicization o f the aesthetic as stylistic index.

All o f these museum effects (or artifacts) are mutually defining and
comprise a mutually supportive circuit o f legitimations; when put into
play beneath the surfaces o f the discourse o f art history and criticism,
their internal contradictions are effectively masked. Th e most notable
example o f this is the opposition between the view o f an artwork as a
unique, irreducible entity with a vitality and unreproducible reality of
its own and the idea o f artwork as medium, sign, or communicative
token. It was this conundrum (this trompe l’oeil effect) that lay at the
heart o f the most fundamental problem facing the design o f the new

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“ discipline” o f art history in the nineteenth century - namely, how it
might be possible to articulate a scientific, systematic history o f otherwise
entirely unique objects.4
What made such a problem all the more acute was the museological
requirement that this “ history” be construed teleologically: as oriented,
arrowed, as it were, and progressive. The past would have to be staged
as that from which we could imag(in)e our descent: as that from which
we would desire not to be excluded. Such a requirement is closely connected
with what was at stake in the fabrication o f modern national
identity, for the “ past” from which one would not wish to be excluded
was, in particular, the legacy o f antiquity. The history o f the competing
claims o f various modem European states to that legacy is well known.
The problem facing the modern museum o f art would have been that
of keeping in play and articulating together a variety o f disparate and contradictory
requirements. These tasks were accomplished by the evolution
of an institution and a professional discourse with remarkably powerful illusory
effects. Any accounting for the museological, for the institution o f
the museum, or for the discipline o f art history must be grounded in an
appreciation o f the extraordinary subtleties and complexities o f these
trompe l’oeil effects, and in an understanding o f their mechanics.
By contrast, much recent literature on the museum has tended to
focus on museological absences: history, politics, women, the other, m inorities
, the non-West — the “ real” complexities and contradictions o f
the world(s) “ outside” the museum. The assumption has been that if the
museum is an instrument for the production o f illusion, then what is
absent is what is “ real.” 5 In this regard, much critical writing has in the
end been complicit with the illusory effects o f the museological, for the
effect has mostly been the reaccommodation o f whatever has been “ ab-
sented” into museological space, without alteration to the museum’s
aestheticist and historicist effects.
Arguments for the inclusion or exclusion o f objects characteristically
avoid the fundamental question regarding the specificity or “ truth” o f
art at the heart o f aesthetic philosophy or o f art history and criticism —
namely, w h e re is it to be found? In relationships with other objects, synchronicaly
or diachronically? In relationships with individual beholders
or users? In the life worlds o f particular artists? In the evolution o f social
mentalities? The specificities o f history and moment? The circumstances
of production and consumption?
Art history has always provided two answers to the question: (a) in
the object itself and (b) in the object’s environment, its “ context(s)” —
two sides o f the same Kantian coin perpetually kept in circulation by
the institutions o f art. The genius and power o f the museum consist in
its continual circulation o f the alternatives that both aestheticist and historicist
ideologies have imposed upon the question o f art and representation
. Despite the common assumption that the museum is that which
brackets out a separate, pure realm o f the aesthetic, it has at the same

4This issue is discussed at length in D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy
Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 54—12 1.
5This perspective is particularly apparent in the two essays by Duncan and Wallach cited
in footnote 2.

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 DONALD PREZIOSI time been an instrument for the legitimation o f the op
with respect to art’s truth: “ History” itself is an artifact o f the museological
.
As in the famous optical illusion o f the Necker cube, there is a perpetual
oscillation in the history o f art history between two apparently
contradictory or opposite solutions. This is the rhetorical economy o f
the double bind, generated at base by the manner in which the original
question is invariably framed with a locative or spatial metaphor - that
the “ truth” o f art must be located s o m e w h e r e . As if it were a phallus.
If we are dealing with illusion here, it is an illusion o f the museum
as frame, enframing device, as G e s t e ll. In fact, the deeper illusion is that
the museum’s labor is illusory (in contrast to what is equally fabricated
as “ real” ). There is no illusion, for there is only illusion.
The primary task o f the museum and o f art history has been the
staging o f the truthfulness o f art: projecting environments (whether architecton
ic
or discursive or both) within which objects might be se en as
conveying (or, in a legalistic sense, conveyancing) their truth; within
which the visible is made legible. In this regard, the museum works as
an instance o f the application o f (scientific) method in a manner not
unlike that o f the early natural sciences, wherein the spatial or visual
deployment o f characteristic elements or forms in patterned arrays itself
declares basic truths — those o f filiation, evolution and descent, origin,
and progression, as well as o f the specific transformative effects o f given
environments (nations, races, classes, genders, landscapes) u p o n Art as
such, upon human creativity as such. Every modem museum is a diagram m atic
tableau or table in this metamorphic sense.
It will be clear, then, that an accounting o f the museum (or o f art
history) must begin with the paradoxes that perennially keep the historian
, critic, or theorist from occupying a secure position on either side
o f these frames, o f that G e s t e ll that fabricates the “ illusion” o f a borderline
between inside and outside and which itself in the end subverts the
applicability o f the inside—outside polarity. The critical study o f the museum
is perforce the study o f the histories o f en fra m in g — o f the practices,
processes, and technologies o f the frame, as well as, at the same time, all
that which works to efface the frame effect.6
If museums in fact simultaneously do all the things being described
here, then any productive attempt to account critically and historically
for the museum, for the museological, must work against the grain o f
those historiographies that construe signification as a product o f relations
o f exteriority, that construe representation as expression (as representation
), and that see artwork as medium or effect.
A “ history” o f the museological would resemble less a historiography
in a conventional sense and more an accounting o f certain deconstructive
and psychoanalytic processes in which time and memory themselves'are
foregrounded rather than taken as given, and where “ interpretation” is
no longer construed as the lifting o f veils or the rendering transparent
o f what seems opaque.

‘ See especially Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press,
1987), part I, pp. 15 -14 7 .

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⋆ ⋆ ⋆ M O D E R N IT Y A G A IN
Let us leave all this in abeyance and switch to a different register by
looking at a particular museum foundation that in interesting ways may
be said to stand, at the beginnings o f our modernities, as an explicit
refusal o f what has been enframed by the museum o f art history over
the past two centuries.
In 18 12 , Sir John Soane published A H is t o r y o f M y H o u s e , in which,
assuming the role o f an imaginary antiquarian o f the future, he discovered
his London house-museum in ruins, offering hypotheses as to the
building’s original function, “ no traces remaining o f the Artist who in-
habited the place.” 7 Over the next two decades, and until his death in
1837, Soane obsessively rebuilt his house-museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
as - to quote his imaginary antiquary o f the future - “ a great assemblage
of ancient fragments which must have been placed there for the advancem ent
and knowledge o f ancient A rt.”
Soane’s remarkable text constructs a “ history” o f his museum from
an imaginary vantage point in the future, when the structure is already
in ruins. The text was published in 18 12 ; Soane spent the next quarter-
century constructing his museum in the image o f what its ruins might
in the future suggest it had been.
N o stranger to “ ruins,” Soane had constructed sham ruins in his earlier
residence in Ealing, Pitzhanger Manor, often wondering aloud to
visitors if they were classic or Gothic, and concluding, in a text written
in 1802 describing that residence, that “ some say they’re put up to puzzle
the antiquary.” 8 Pitzhanger Manor was built, in Soane’s own words, to
“ breed a race o f artists,” sharing this program with his later residence in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Both houses came to include basement “ monk’s
apartments,” and in his writings Soane often alludes to a fictional monk
who wandered like a ghost among the basement “ ruins.” That Soane
himself identified strongly with this monk (“ Padre Giovanni” ) emerges
in a number o f his letters and notebooks alluding to the “ M onk’s Cell”
or Parlour which he created in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the teens (ca.
18 15 —16) — a section o f the building he increasingly haunted, redeco-
rated, and rebuilt.
Whereas many o f the elements o f his London house-museum reflect
attitudes and even models drawn from elsewhere in England and France
at the time, what made Soane’s Museum so extraordinary was its juxtaposition
o f many disparate elements, period tastes, and historical and
literary allusions. Soane intended the museum as a semipublic institution,
an instructive model o f taste, and a visual history o f art, architecture,
decoration, and design. The building was arranged for serious study and

7John Soane, Crude Hints towards a History of My House in L .I . Fields (London: The Soane
Museum, 1812). A detailed description o f the museum may be found in A New Description
of Sir John Soane's Museum, 7th rev. ed., 1986, prepared by Sir John Summerson and
published by the trustees o f the museum. See also the excellent study by Susan Feinberg
Millenson, Sir John Soane's Museum (Ann Arbor: UM I Research Press, 1987), with extensive
bibliography.
8John Soane, Plans, Elevations and Views in Perspective, of Pitzhanger Manor-House, and of the
Ruins of an Edifice of Roman Architecture, situated on the border of Ealing Green, with a Description
of the Ancient and Present State of the Manor-House, In a Letter to a Friend. 1 802, n.p.

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D O NALD PREZIOSI included original specimens, models, casts, decorations, and illustrations
o f the possible effects o f applying ancient prototypes to the arrangement
o f modern functional spaces.
The collection o f the museum was largely classical in nature, yet the
spirit o f its arrangement has been said to reflect Romantic and neo-
Gothic tastes. Overall, the museum appears to continue the tradition o f
the private collection or k a b in e tt/g a b in e tto o f the late Renaissance col-
lector, with its overwhelming atmosphere o f horror v a c u i and o f the random
juxtaposition o f artifacts and objects o f v e rtù . And to be sure,
Soane’s Museum may plausibly be seen as one o f the final historical
examples o f the K u n s t - u n d W u n d e r k a m m e rn o f the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and in many ways perhaps the most remarkable o f
them all.9
T o be sure, with its incongruous juxtapositions o f the most disparate
objects, the arrangement o f the collection had all the trademarks o f
the traditional curio closet: a Sumatran fungus nestled among antique
statuary; gemstones alongside metal horse stirrups; contemporary or
eighteenth-century paintings (including Hogarth’s R a k e ’s Progress series);
cork models o f the Parthenon that could be bought on the streets o f
London for a few pence; an original Egyptian sarcophagus in proximity
to fragments o f Gothic church ornament; specimens o f American marble
from the vicinity o f Baltimore; an old wooden — and — leather clog; part o f
the horn o f a deer found twenty-one feet below ground during excavations
for the new State Paper Office in London; an Ottoman pistol
made in imitation o f Napoleonic imitations o f English pistols; pieces o f
elm bark shaped exactly like Ionic volutes; an Elizabethan chopine whose
handle, in Soane’s own words, had “ a remarkable position” (in fact
looking quite like an erect penis).
Architectural models were placed on ceilings, and models made for
other buildings were used as skylights in part o f the house. Am ong the
medieval and classical fragments stood the tomb o f the imaginary monk
Padre Giovanni, which in fact contained the remains o f (real) pet
dog Fanny. In his D e s c rip tio n o f the H o u s e a n d M u s e u m , a text published
in 1835, Soane eulogized his faithful canine companion (“ Alas, poor
Fanny . . . ” ), noting with nary a pause in his text the benefits o f the
new central heating system he designed and built, whose machinery
stood adjacent to the tomb o f Fanny/Padre Giovanni.
The structural fabric o f the museum was no less remarkable, with
several walls made up o f hinged panels o f paintings that, when opened
up, revealed compositions continuous with views through opened walls
into a corridor or courtyard. Changes o f level at unexpected points,
astonishing juxtapositions o f diverse objects o f different sizes, scales, or
periods, controlled views through the building revealing teasingly “ his-
torical” stylistic genealogies — the museum was a multidimensional
trompe l’oeil. Indeed, it remains so today, for the museum was preserved
essentially intact in its final (1837) form by an act o f Parliament.

9See Impey and MacGregor, The Origins of Museums, on curiosity cabinets in various European
countries; J. von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. Ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens (Leipzig: Braunschweig, 1908; new edition 1978).

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 The entire collection surrounds a large, three-storied light well, a M O D E R N IT Y A G A IN
domed space at the center o f which is a bust o f Soane himself, finished
and put in place in 1 829, standing directly opposite a bust o f the Apollo
Belvedere. Soane recorded the sculptor’s comments upon presenting the
bust to Soane: He said that he himself could no longer tell whether he
had made a bust o f John Soane or o f Julius Caesar.
Soane’s Museum is widely considered to be a transitional phenomenon
, something halfway between the Renaissance cusiosity cabinet and
the modem museum: a romantic synthesis o f pseudohistorical settings
and Soane’s own personal, poetic, and architectonic visions. W hat is
absent in such a view is what it is clear that Soane’s construction is
directly addressing, and standing in critique o f — the new public, civic
museum o f art, in particular the British Museum itself, which was rising
in its present form during those years, across town in Bloomsbury.10
It was the rationalized, historicist, genealogizing collection o f antiquities
built around the original bequest o f Sir Hans Sloane that was John
Soane’s very particular object o f address. Soane’s Museum works to iron
icize that project by problematizing aesthetic chronology and rationalized
genealogy, by transforming what had become the canonical dramaturgy
o f the public art museum into a series o f intersecting labyrinths: a land-
scape o f ruins and fragments, a museal and sepulchral monument. Soane
was a great admirer o f Alexandre Lenoir and o f not only his Museum
o f French Monuments in Paris, in the converted convent o f the Petits-
Augustins (1793—18 15), but also his “ Elysium,” the antecedent o f the
Père Lachaise cemetery (which Soane regarded as the greatest monument
o f modern French art)."
At the same time, Soane’s Museum fragments Soane himself, setting
him up as the antithesis o f Sloane. In contrast to the founders o f most
other great private collections, Soane is curiously elusive: He is figured
in his museum only in fragments, or only ambiguously, as with his (un-
labeled) bust. He is situated, in his own writings, both anterior to the
museum (in the guise o f the imaginary monk Giovanni) and posterior
to its falling into ruins (as in the text whose protagonist is the imaginary
antiquarian o f the future).
In short, everything about the museum constitutes an opposition to
the principles o f reason informing the new British Museum and a palpable
critique o f its agendas. Soane’s Museum foregrounds the ficticities
o f the disciplinary autonomies installed in the new British Museum,
ironicizing the historiographic dramaturgies o f the nascent professional
discourse o f art history. Soane’s Museum foregrounds what the collection
built around Sloane’s bequest masks: the impurity, otherness, and ficticity
at the heart o f the aesthetic, o f “ history,” o f modernity. Its subject matter
, in fact, is the ironies o f the frame, which it articulates architecton-

10A useful brief history o f the British Museum may be found in Marjorie Caygill, The Story
of the British Museum (London: British Museum Publications, 1981). In 1823, the government
commissioned Robert Smirke to design a Greek Ionic-porticoed building in Bloomsbury
to house the expanding collections, which had outgrown various quarters, including
Montague House, since the museum’s foundation in 1753. John Soane’s own design for
the new institution was passed over in favor o f Smirke’s.
11Millenson, Sir John Soane’s Museum, pp. 14 0 -1.

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DONALD PREZIOSI ically, structurally, visually, and textually. It is emblematic o f the fact that
periodicity is a fiction we tell ourselves in order to dramatize, teleologically
, an ahistorical argument. As the antithesis o f the British Museum
across town, it demonstrates that there is no illusion for there is only
illusion. It stages this in the predicative frameworks set up for its users
with false and misleading itineraries, sudden disruptions o f canonical historical
or aesthetic genealogy, and with an astonishingly creative use o f
the banal, o f bathos, o f the oxymoronic, o f masquerade. It is the first
“ post” -modern museum: a museum o f high camp at the beginnings o f
modernist museology.
N o canonical Temple o f Art, no monument o f sense, no totalizing
theater o f memory, Soane’s Museum distances itself from panopticism
and totalization on every front. It indicates (to say this in another register)
that the trope is not a derived, marginal, or aberrant form o f language,
but rather the linguistic paradigm par excellence: not just one linguistic
mode among others, but rather that which characterizes language as such
as regards its inescapable heterogeneities. What Soane’s Museum fore-
grounds, then, are the sleights o f hand and the technologies o f illusion
that support the modem museum and its spaces o f memory. And it offers
its users a view into those technologies by its disruptive and disconcerting
refusals o f totalization and o f the aestheticized “ histories” o f art becoming
canonical in the major civic museums o f art in Europe at the time.
O f course, we se e this only if we view Soane’s Museum and the
British Museum simultaneously and stereoptically — if we read each
against the grain o f the other. The one seems odd only in the light o f
expectations set up by the other. A century and a half later, Soane’s
Museum seems odd, idiosyncratic, perverse; the British Museum seems
canonical, natural, “ modern.”
It should be clear, if only in shorthand here, that the museological
was a highly contested space at the beginnings o f the modernist museum,
however much the moral semiologies o f the latter have come t o be seen
as natural and inevitable today. B y foregrounding the ironies o f the
frame, Soane’s Museum constituted itself as a critical artifact, highlighting
the constructivist bases o f perception, and refusing complicity with the
passive consumerism o f imaginary “ histories” staged by its sister institution
in Bloomsbury.12
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
What, then, can we say about art history, about Art, about the “ truth
in art,” if its institution has from the beginning been a trompe l’oeil o f
astonishing power and complexity? And what can we say about our
modernity if it can be so enframed by a device such as the museum?
And what, indeed, can we say about our “ post” -modernity?
W h at is realized in (my) history is not the past definite o f w h at was, since it is
no m o re, o r even the present perfect o f w h at has been in w h at I am, but the
future anterior o f w h at I shall have been fo r w hat I am in the process o f
b e c o m in g .13

12On the subject o f the intended audiences o f the British Museum, as well as on the staging
o f displays for such audiences, see the excellent study by Inderpal Grewal, “ The Guidebook
and the Museum: Aesthetics, Education, and Nationalism in the British Museum,” in press,
13Jacques Lacan, E crits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 300.

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